French suffix with jardin / TUE 11-15-22 / Feminine name that's also a tropical jungle vine / Humble as a manger / The Allman brother who married Cher / Old dagger / UK-based financial giant / 1980s sitcom ET / Game fish whose face resembles that of a herd animal / Healthful husks in cereal or muffins / Pointy-eared magical creature / Realtor-speak for "move"

Constructor: Sandy Ganzell

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (***for a Tuesday***)

THEME: "OLD MACDONALD" (51A: Children's song featuring the animals and sounds in this puzzle) — theme answers contain farm animals featured in the song, and directly underneath said animals in the grid are their sounds. The grid also contains the song's refrain: "EIEIO" (56A: Refrain in 51-Across that accompanies the sounds at 24-, 37- and 47-Across):

Theme answers:

• "DON'T HAVE A COW" / MUU MUU (20A: "Just chill!" / 24A: Loose-fitting Hawaiian dress)
• SHEEPSHEAD / BABA (31A: Game fish whose face resembles that of a herd animal / 37A: Rum-soaked cake)
• WHITE HORSE / NAE NAE (41A: Capital of the Yukon / 47A: Hip-hop dance move popular in the 2010s)

Word of the Day: SHEEPSHEAD (31A) —

Archosargus probatocephalus, the sheepshead, is a marine fish that grows to 76 cm (30 in), but commonly reaches 30 to 50 cm (10 to 20 in). It is deep and compressed in body shape, with five or six dark bars on the side of the body over a gray background. It has sharp dorsal spines. Its diet consists of oysters, clams, and other bivalves, and barnacles, fiddler crabs, and other crustaceans. It has a hard mouth, with several rows of stubby teeth – the frontal ones closely resembling human teeth – which help crush the shells of prey.

Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn is named after this fish. (wikipedia)

• • •

 

I want to start with the good, though this puzzle did not start good. Damn it, I'm starting with the bad again. OK, the good: I had a genuine "aha" "oh, that's what's going on" "very cute" moment when I read the revealer clue and saw that there were *sounds* involved as well as animals. To that point, I just thought NAE NAE and BABA were just your run-of-the-mill repetitive crosswordese (probably because this puzzle had a Lot of crosswordese). It was very pleasant to find out that those answers had a thematic reason for being there, and a crucial thematic reason as well (see also the revealer, "EIEIO," which is an ultra-common ultra-unwelcome bit of fill in most puzzles ... but here, magically, voilà, it's a vital component of the puzzle and not the cat hair on your blouse that it usually is. So, thematically, this was pleasing. The revealer revealed the way it was designed to reveal. In Shortzland, that is considered enough—the theme is everything and the rest be damned. Or, more accurately, the rest be Whatever, Shrug, We Don't Care. If the fill is great, great, if it's only barely passable, great. The only requirement with the fill is that it look fill-like. Overall fill quality appears not to matter to the editors, and so some days we get beautiful, highly polished grids, and some days ... we get what we got today. 

In the puzzle's defense, the theme is dense, or denser than it looks, with stacked elements in all four of the themers (including the revealer, with its shadow revealer right underneath). But still. Still. -IÈRE!?!?! In this day and age, that is close to inexcusable. Maybe I'm supposed to be grateful they didn't use the old palindrome "Able was I ERE I saw Elba," as the clue, but that is expecting far too much charity from me. If -IÈRE were the only real rough spot, even though it's a Very rough spot, fine, maybe it's a footnote in this write-up. But instead it's a harbinger, and the "hits" just keep coming. Actually, the I had already taken a bunch of "hits" before I even got to -IÈRE, which is to say, before I ever got out of the NW: RELO ETON RETIE ... you wouldn't pick on these individually, but when they come in a dense cluster, and *then* the puzzle hits you with -IÈRE!?!? ... that's just cruel. You know I'm far away from where I should be as a solver when all I'm doing is stopping to take screenshots of the subpar fill:

I was so distracted by how olden the fill is that (as you can see) I imagine that the [1980s sitcom E.T.] is ELF! I screenshotted four bits of fill roughness, but you can count a lot more if you care to. The grid is just thick with repeaters, many of them Of Yore, and since I didn't know MUUMUU and NAE NAE were themers until the end, they felt like part of the problem. HSBC is never good—just a series of letters I can never remember and have no hope of telling you what they stand for. And what the actual hell is up with the repeated sound answers. In the theme material, I get it, it's necessary: MUUMUU, BABA, NAENAE. But ... "USA! USA!"? "NOEL, NOEL!"?! Were those supposed to be a joke joke? The puzzle was a drag to fill in. I was grateful to witness the burst of thematic cleverness at the end, when I fully comprehended the theme—that was a nice moment, but it couldn't fully redeem the rest. There's just no reason that the road to your revealer should be an unpleasant endurance test.

The puzzle played harder than usual for me because I had no idea that SHEEPSHEAD was a fish and I completely blanked on WHITEHORSE. The HEAD part of SHEEPSHEAD was giving me fits because of HAH (ugh, more crosswordese) (32D: "Pshaw!"). My ELF error made things worse. I had HEH, and even wanted FEH! at one point. Really glad the clue for SHEEPSHEAD had the "face" part in it, so I could (eventually) get to -HEAD. I also had trouble with UNWORN (25D: Like brand-new tires) (me: "UN ... BALD?"), and CHOIR (I wrote CROWD at first) (16A: Group that may stand on risers). I never know how LOOIE is going to be spelled; I feel like it changes spelling based on whether it's slang for a "lieutenant" or slang for a Canadian coin or slang for a Canadian comedian (actually, LOUIE Anderson is from Minnesota, so scratch that) (and the Canadian coin is actually a LOONIE so just scratch this whole sentence). That's all the trouble spots, I think. Really liked the theme, really disliked the fill. See you tomorrow. AONE AWOL AWL ENID goodbye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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One-horse carriage / THU 3-23-17 / Distinctive filmmakers / Old typesetting machine informally / Certain bourdeaux informally

Constructor: Sandy Ganzell

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: straitened circumstances — three Down columns are less wide than the others; words meaning "the opposite of wide" must precede all the answers in those columns in order for them to make sense (i.e. you have to mentally supply the initial word)

Theme answers:

• [Thin] MINTS (14D: Girl Scout cookie offering)
• [Slim] CHANCE (42D: What a long shot has) (ironically, "Fat" also works as the initial word here)
• [Lean] CUISINE (22D: Brand for weight-watchers)
• [Narrow] ESCAPE (16D: Barely successful avoidance of calamity)
• [Skinny] JEANS (49D: Form-fitting casual wear)

Word of the Day: CARIOLE (17A: One-horse carriage) —

noun

noun: cariole

1. 1.

   historical

   a small open horse-drawn carriage for one person.

   • a light covered cart.
2. 2.

   (in Canada) a kind of sled pulled by a horse or dogs and with space for one or more passengers. (google)

• • •

It's annoying when I have to read a "Note" to understand the theme because AcrossLite can't display it (apparently the "app" can't either), but tech problems aside, I think this is a wonderful little theme. Really uses *all* the viable synonyms for "the opposite of wide. I want to say the theme is thin ... because it is ... I mean it is, and it is ... sparse, I mean. You know what I mean—there aren't many theme squares. That kind of thin. Just 29 squares involved. Even a lightly themed puzzle will have a minimum of 40 or so. And yet this one feels complete as is. Seems possible that one could have added some THIN-related elements somewhere else in the grid, but it seems just as likely that that would've bogged the grid down and resulted in less clean fill. As it is, this grid is mostly very cleanly filled. CARIOLE, though (ugggggh) nearly destroyed me (17A: One-horse carriage). How on god's green am I supposed to keep all the carriage terminology straight, crossword gods! We've been on to the automobile for a century now, come on. Brougham, landau, phaeton, surrey, stanhope, sulky, fiacre ... I've seen most if not all of those in crosswords before. Well, landau for sure.  Maybe I dreamed the others. My point is that CARIOLE was one where I needed every cross and because it crossed a quotation word (TACT) and a vaguely clued clothing item (SARI), and *those* crossed a [random TV station], I was staring down the barrel of Fail for a bit. Had CAMI for 3D: Article of apparel that often leaves one arm bare, and that gave me _BC for 1A: Cable channel owned by Time Warner, which seemed *very* plausible. Ended up figuring out that it had to be TACT at 1D, which gave me TBS, and then SARI. But none of that trouble would've been real trouble without nutso time-traveling archaic CARIOLE. Blargh.

["Should I bring the brougham around, Dad?" "No! CARIOLE, my wayward son!"]

But as I say, nothing else rankled in the slightest. This appears to be a debut from this constructor, and it's a promising one. I like this better than the entire oeuvre of at least a couple oft-published NYT regulars. I mean, that bar's not terribly high, because those guys' puzzles are super-ugh, but still—nice to have a solid hit your first time out. Oh, wait. COSM is terrible. Very terrible. My general good feeling, though, is undiminished.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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